Your Budget and Adventure Travel Destination

What’s New Around Mount Teide

Mount Teide in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands in Spain, is the highest point in Spain and the highest point above sea level in the Atlantic. It’s also a volcano that’s teeming with activity – thankfully, none of it involving lava (at least at the moment anyway.) The area around Mount Teide is abuzz right now, partially due to the following initiatives.

Festival de Cortos Villa de La Orotava

Although you’ve just missed it this year, the Festival de Cortos Villa de La Orotava in the town of La Orotava goes into it’s 8th year in 2013. Growing from its humble roots, this Short Film Festival is fast becoming a popular launching pad for independent filmmakers. It’s mostly in Spanish though, so better brush up if you plan to attend.

Tenerife Top Training Centre

After the London 2012 Olympics, many of the UK athletes headed off on Canary Island holidays for some much needed rest and relaxation. But did you know many of them were here before too? But they weren’t here on holiday. At the recent World Travel Market in London, swimmer Joanne Jackson estimated about half of the British Olympic team had trained in Tenerife – including cyclist Bradley Wiggins and triathletes Alistair and Jonny Brownlee.

Tenerife Top Training Centre (also known as T3) is one of the centres the athletes trained at. Located in La Caleta in the southwest corner of the island, many Olympic hopefuls come to train here because of the ideal weather year-round, and the fact that it’s only one time zone away from the UK – a perfect combination that allows them to hit the ground running.

Volcanic Trails

As part of an initiative by the Tenerife Tourism Corporation’s called “Tenerife, Volcanoes of Life” a series of hiking and walking trails have been developed around Mount Teide and surrounding island volcanoes.

In an apparent effort to branch out from the beach and party destination the island has been labeled with, the Tenerife Tourism Corporation in conjunction with scientists from the Canary Islands Institute of Volcanology and the Council of Tenerife have created the trails in five volcanic areas around the island. The themes for each area are: Ancient Volcanoes, Legendary Volcanoes, Two Valleys, Pumice Landscapes and Land of Contrasts.

Since Tenerife is home to the highest volcanic cone in the world as well as over 100 craters and “badlands” — barren lava surfaces that have eroded over the centuries, it makes sense to finally develop a system of trails for tourists.